Where do we go?
by Phate on Dec.21, 2011, under Uncategorized
Well as you know i haven’t done a post in a short while..due generally because i get in a coding session and i’m gone for a while..however looking at the analytics i see there is a high bounce rate so my question to you is:
Where do we go now?
What would you like to see here? What do you expect when you come here?..please feel free to leave comments, suggestions so we can better the experience for you..
Tired of blogs/blog designs? want interaction? Great! Let us know .. I know i myself are tired of the same old simplistic blog design and find myself only really using it for a resource for minor coding issues..What’s the thoughts on moving the tech blog to a subdomain of this and shift our focus to something more interesting.
So to sum it up: Leave a comment, tell us what you like, what you want to see and more importantly what you’d like us to do with this place to make it more user friendly 
- Phate
Phate [at] HouseOfSyn [dot] com
Chrome opens everything with firefox
by Phate on Aug.22, 2011, under Misc/Random, Technology
Now today’s issue was an issue whereby chromium/chrome was opening all downloads with firefox …now it’s been doing that for a short while but i haven’t cared to bother checking what the problem was and how to fix it…however today after creating a several page website in a couple of hours i felt productive…better still i felt i’d tackle this issue once and for all
Now being the idiot i am i assumed i had a problem with chromium so i figured while i was at it i’d just update it/reinstall it from the portage collection ( /usr/portage/www-client/chromium) however as chromium-bin has been pulled from the repository it took _AGES_ to complete..Really… I’d compare it to compiling X and KDE on a P3… So unless you want to walk away from your computer for a good 6 hours (like my netbook) i wouldn’t recommend it.
So after some research and looking myself it ocoured to me that chrome opens _everything_ in linux with xdg-open …now what’s wrong with that you might ask? Well lets say i’m running fluxbox (as i am) so xdg identifies the DE (Desktop Environment) as a generic one and treats it as such…THIS is where the problem arises ..
So what’s the solution you ask? Simple!
edit your /usr/bin/xdg-open file as root, search for ‘case “$DE‘
which will bring you to the following lines:
case "$DE" in
kde)
open_kde "$url"
;;
gnome)
open_gnome "$url"
;;
xfce)
open_xfce "$url"
;;
generic)
# open_generic "$url"
open_kde "$url" # added to stop firefox opening issue
;;
*)
exit_failure_operation_impossible "no method available for opening '$url'"
;;
esac
Now don’t worry if this code looks somewhat daunting and as you may of noticed the part that isn’t bolded would be different.
As you see here i commented out ( # Comments out the line) the option when it identifies as generic and instead used KDE’s handler
to handle it (as i originally used kde) now rather than kde you can use xfce or gnome if you’re running it, obviously this saves you from having
to go to the trouble of configuring open_generic types.
On a side note: i think a minor issue i had with Progress manager appearing may be solved ..if not stay tuned for the next post 
And as always – Take care and geek on
Phate
Phate [at] HouseOfSyn [dot] com
Wicd can’t connect to wireless (bad password)
by Phate on Aug.16, 2011, under Technology
So i’ve had this issue and as you may know from a previous post i’m running Gentoo Linux on a Lenovo S10 netbook (Which still runs beautifully despite this issue) now on trying to connect to a wireless network it would give me an error ‘bad password’ on connecting even though the password was correct.
Now if you want to go straight to the solution just scroll past here, however this might outline things to look at if my solution doesn’t work for you
1st: I ”emerge -C wicd” (Or uninstalled it for you people who are running another distro)
2nd: I then “emerge –sync” ( Updated the repository to get any new ebuilds and possibly get a new up to date version)
3rd: I then “emerge wicd” (Reinstalled wicd, this installed a later version)
Unfortunately these things didn’t resolve my issue so i took a further step:
Reinstalled wpa_supplicant
Thinking that my issue may not of been wicd itself but the wpa management itself i thought reinstalling it would fix it.
Result? No dice, still broken.
So after much searching to no avail i decided to have a look for conflicts ( multiple services/daemons controlling the adaptor(s) )
And came to this final conclusion:
In my case it appears NetworkManager was at the default runlevel (It was starting and managing wireless aswell as the other adaptor)
Now in order to solve this issue what i did was:
Remove NetworkManager (or network-manager) from startup – This is so wicd can actually manage the connections as you intend it to do, your network manager may be “NetworkManager” “network-manager” or it could be some other network manager all together…main point is stop it from starting at the run level
Remove NetworkManager from your system – This is more of an optional step, i like to be thorough and insure that there is going to be no conflict at all…and hey, at the end of the day you can always just reinstall the network manager
Remove wicd from startup and uninstall - This is also more of an optional step, just i like to make sure in no way has the install of wicd been configured based on networkmanager being the default management application.
Reinstall wicd and add to default run level - We reinstall wicd, add it to start on boot so it manages connections, then from your window manager you can run wicd-client and connect to your network
Additional notes: If you find you still cant connect, in wicd-client have a look at what wpa-supplicant driver you’re using, to access that you simply click “Preferences” then go to the “Advanced Settings” tab from in the wicd-client – This should almost always be set to wext
( However if wext isn’t working for you it might be worth checking out the others after testing the options listed earlier on in this post)
As always, Take care and geek out
Phate
Phate [at] HouseOfSyn [dot] com
Computers, Code and Complications.
by Phate on Apr.18, 2011, under Technology
Well another post from me again, a lot has changed and yet nothing…but the main point of todays post is to detail
a few interesting coding things i’ve come across, most are stupid things everyone should know but out of laziness get neglected.
So, lets start with the first:
Internet Explorer hates you.
As the name says ‘Internet Explorer hates you‘ Because lets face it: It does..Chances are if something isn’t rendering right the thing that is rendering it wrong is IE, you can support firefox and webkit and it will still manage to render differently…So here is a couple of diagnostic tricks.
- If things such as light boxes don’t render or objects just wont appear and work: CHECK YOU HAVE DOCTYPE – Internet explorer will assume you’re using Shorttags otherwise which in short means your code wont work.
- If you’re in the situation as most face that IE will render divs and boxes differently from any other browser engine on the planet…Make it happy, Use a small ‘hack’ to work around it, give it its own class by adding * html .class{} Under it, for example:
#container{
width: 1024px; // Width for decent browsers
height: 1500px; // height for decent browsers
}
* html #container{
width: 800px; // width only for IE
height: 1000px; // Height only for IE
}
Now this should make IE override the orginal declaration and use the other one, however firefox and other browsers ignore it, This is a great technique for situations where the engines behave differently ( i believe because * html picks up <html> in IE where as in other browsers it doesnt?)
Now thats enough IE ones for now, lets move on to some other notable things:
Linux is your friend:
Now i know that kind of makes me sound like an elitist however as with most things there is method in my madness for instance:
- Kwrite has some awesome hot keys (CTRL+G for Goto Line #, Ctrl+D to comment out a series of lines and F11 to show line numbers) These HUGELY decrease coding time
- LAMP …Specifically Apache,Mysql and PHP There is something that makes me feel warm and fuzzy when i boot up a system that has all my needed web services running.. and being able to track logs by simply “cat /var/log/apache2/error_log” to see where the issues lie, infact it actually annoyed me before as i want to clear my error log as i access it so i wrote a quick file in c to cat the log and remove it, named it ‘errors’ so now when i have an issue i just type ‘errors’ and find out exactly what is wrong the moment of the problem..kind of neat.
- Distributions vary on performance and requirements, For those of you who have read my prior post about my lenovo Ideapad, i run Gentoo Linux on it…have for quite some time now and it still works brilliantly, the only real change i’ve made is i moved to Fluxbox and i run Conky (with a modified custom script to show what i need )..And despite being a low spec machine it runs superbly When this dies i might by another (or at least one with a better mousepad).
- Misc things help in conjunction with each other, for instance alone chrome (or chromium on linux) is about the same as that on windows, however with dolphin and a terminal window makes development fast, diagnosis faster and it overall easier.
Now for quite possibly the best bit of advice:
Add the following to your if(isset($_POST['submit'])){} cases
or wherever you are getting a post form in:
/*echo “<pre>”;
print_r($_POST);
echo “</pre>”;*/
Why this? Because if a variable isn’t updating or you don’t know if you’re missing one you uncomment it (Or CTRL+SHIFT+D if you’re a kwrite user ) and it will print your post variables in the pre-formatted way (so new lines, indentation).
Now with this post i believe i’ll update it rather than post new ones so stay tuned
Feel free to comment/email if you’ve got anything to add
- Phate
Phate [At] HouseOfSyn [dot] Com
tech video
by Phate on Feb.21, 2011, under Uncategorized
As time progresses we continue on seeing what bigger and better things can come of what it currently is. Which brings me to the next point:
Lately i’ve been toying with the idea of radically changing how the site is and introducing a video show of sorts generally addressing tech …so in short a tech video show ..The idea behind this is we as people want things *NOW* we don’t want to read, we don’t want to go to effort to get something, we want to be spoon fed, infact if we could do away with the spoon itself it would make us even happier….and that’s what i plan to bring to you, force-fed pre-processed food…without a spoon ^_^
That way you can get your tech tastes filled without needing to read long stories behind it.
Welcome to Skynet…book
by Phate on Nov.10, 2010, under Technology
Linux on Lenovo Ideapad
Yes, here we are…on my new netbook..multi-monitor linux system lenovo S10 Ideapad…So firstly…a uname -a
phate@Skynet ~/public_html $ uname -a
So now you see the title makes more sense..I called it Skynet…being the old was called “CodeServ” (After my router, packetserv) which kinda plays on the names of irc services (nickserv, chanserv, etc..).
Now the specs
Model: Lenovo S10-3 Ideapad Netbook
CPU: Intel(R) ATOM(TM) CPU N450 @1.66GHz 533Mhz 512KB
Memory: 1019436 kB ( 1GB of ram)
Hard Drive: 250GB
Camera: integrated 1.3 megapixel
Weight: 1.1KG
Battery: 3 Cell or 6 Cell (i haven’t checked)
Monitor: 10.2″ TFT 1024×600 AntiGlare
Graphics: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 (64Mb Shared)
Mouse: Synaptics Touchpad (Multi-touch) (TERRIBLE)
External Video: DE-15 VGA port
Flash memory slot: accepts MMC, SD, Memory Stick, and Memory Stick PRO
Expansion slot: ExpressCard34
Network: Wireless b/g/n Athereos
Gigabit Ethernet (r8169)
Now what’s awesome about that is the Athereos chipset is natively supported in linux and with the limited cpu/memory/graphics makes it a perfect linux machine.
So in distro selection i had the choice between quite a few, and suggestions consisted of netbook editions…But me choose Ubuntu netbook edition? PFFT, that’s not being enough of a zealot, i picked Gentoo. Yes…Linux on the lenovo ideapad. It took approximately 3days of compiling X with KDE…before i decided on LXDE (and i copied my music across)
So lets break it down to programs i have installed:
Amarok – Music player
PHP,MySQL, Apache – For webdev
LXDE – Lightweight desktop environment
Chromium – Browser, great for moving tabs around
KDE – Originally for the desktop but now moreso for the apps such as Kwrite (syntax highlighting)
and various pentest tools (It is a netbook afterall, what else are you ment to do other than get into wireless networks and reek havoc…kidding).
So with all the applications installed it is a nice little machine, downside(s) so far:
The mouse – It is the most horrible thing ever invented…They had the ‘great’ idea to take the touch mousepad that every laptop has…and take everything good about it…and get rid of it…instead you have a touchpad …thats left and right click buttons are part of it…so lets say you want to click on …well anything…you can potentially move the mouse OFF the object accidently because as you clicked you slightly moved your finger..I however have gotten more used to it…but the development team should still be shot in the face to make sure they don’t come up with more ‘brilliant’ designs and burned in a fire incase they come back as zombies with the intent of destroying good products</rant>
Other than that, Excellent netbook, the installation proccess was quite fun and smooth, all peripherals are working and with 4 folders, 3 editors, 4 consoles, 2 secure shells, 3 browsers with 30 tabs open and amarok playing music i’m YET to have it lag out…its run completely smoothly even with running it across 2 monitors
which leaves me with my point of the post:
If you buy one of these whats the very absolute first thing you do? Install linux on it.
This is because they install Windows 7 starter edition on it…it gave me a score of 2.1 (if i recall correctly) with the highest score of 3.0 being my “gaming graphics”
Infact i’d go far as to suggest that anyone who buys a netbook to install linux on it..as linux’s downfall is gaming whereas windows issue is resource/memory management.
So there you have it, Installing Linux on the Lenovo Ideapad is simple as making a bootable linux flash drive, installing as you normally would any other distro and compiling your kernel for it.
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL Windows 7/Vista BSOD
by Phate on Jan.03, 2010, under Technology
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
Soooo i had the error “DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL tcpip.sys”
along with a nice little BSoD which made me feel warm and fuzzy inside this
would happen everytime i launched Team Fortress 2 now after much
Annoyance and working out i found a list of things it could be
(before i analysed the minidump of it) and they were:
Faulty memory
Hard disk isues
Graphics card driver
Network card driver
Network card hardware
Power issue
Page file issue
PEBKAC
So as you can see it could be a various amount of issues
that’s if you look at various forums
(i found out that it was in tcpip.sys from the memory dump)
Now AFTER analysing the memory dump i found both the cause and solution
to my evil problem
// Begin solution
Exit your Antivirus/Internet security suite =P
// End solution
The reason why it causes a Windows 7 BSOD or Windows Vista BSOD is because the Internet security hasn’t got ‘full’ compatability with the O.S
the firewall sits on the tcpip.sys for network level filtering and well…breaks it
(This however is just in my experience and does differ with different Av/Internet security suites)
Although i wouldn’t recommend turning off or closing your internet security to rectify the problem
it seems the most logical work around…however since i closed it and executed the game again i noticed
i had not gotten the error again…So it’s a strange one. Wind
So i hope this was able to at least help one of you guys and remember if you have any issues
topics you want discussed to just drop me an email at
phate [at] houseofsyn [dot] com
Sound and Webcam problems on ASUS Pro50SR laptops running Windows 7 64bit.
by arcanum on Nov.22, 2009, under Technology
So I finally decided to give my Windows 7 RC a run on my ASUS Pro50SR laptop after running it perfectly fine on my desktop PC.
Installed Windows 7 Ultimate (RC) x86_64 and it detected all my devices automagically… or so I thought.
First problem I noticed trying to use my webcam. The image was upside down, couldnt find anyway to fix the problem. So I decided to download drivers for my webcam directly from http://support.asus.com this didnt really help.
The image was still upside down, how did I fix it? Download the drivers like I had done and edit the file snp2uvc.inf search for “HKR,DefaultSettings,Flip,0×00010001,0″ and replace the last 0 with a 1 so it becomes “HKR,DefaultSettings,Flip,0×00010001,1″. Do the same for “HKR,Settings,Flip,0×00010001,0″. Save the settings, exit and run the install excutable (not actually called install.exe).
After making this change Windows bitched it could not verify the signature of the driver. Click install anyway and reboot… TADA! Your webcam should now work perfectly.
Now for the sound problems, sound works… but it sounds like a bad poorly tuned radio crackling and spitting at you. The drivers from ASUS for the realtek HD audio devices this laptop uses actually makes the problem worse. Only solution i’ve found so far is to download and install the Windows Vista x86_64 drivers, and run the install in compatibility mode for Windows Vista SP2. Now your audio should work perfectly.
Hope that helps. If anyone finds a solution as to why Linux seems to hate this laptop and freezes randomly let me know in the comments or email me directly.
arcanum [at] houseofsyn [dot] com
EDIT: Drivers for the Asus laptop can be found at http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us
Amarok 2 and KDE
by Phate on Aug.10, 2009, under Technology
Well i had a few issues with Amarok 2 and KDE …(namely amarok doesnt work ) it seemed libmysqld.so.0 couldn’t be found…and the cause? I’m an idiot…yup you heard it right…the obvious solution (i’m on gentoo) was to
emerge -C mysql
emerge -C amarok
…this will of course remove both mysql and amarok, i then done
emerge mysql
which naturally installed mysql
followed by
emerge amarok
which then was happy that the dependancy was satisfied installed without issues…now even though i googled relentlessly and found no decent solutions i figured i’d follow logic for a change..so incase you’re having the issue this should fix the problem ( make sure you done an emerge –sync before hand though so the repository is up to date)
So what happened was the amarok database wouldn’t work because it wasn’t compiled with mysql support so it didn’t know it was there.
Hopefully i’m not the only one stupid enough to not realize this..and in that case …you’re welcome.
Linux Kernel issues
by Phate on Aug.10, 2009, under Technology
A friend had a linux issue with SiS190/SIS191 on his laptop ASUS Pro 50 series (SR)
Where the network would resolve by ping but not ping the computer, in short they cant ping network. This is due to a memory issue
and a easy work around is by limiting the memory to 3gb you can do this (with most)
on the kernel load type “kernelname mem=3G” where kernelname is your kernel…in this case it was “gentoo mem=3G” i think the issue has been fixed in the later kernels but the work around allows you to get your network up and update it. … You’re welcome. 
after passing the memory limitation to the kernel
setup as usual
ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.222
route add default gw 192.168.0.1
echo “nameserver 192.168.0.1″ > /etc/resolv.conf
Note: the IP may vary depending on your network setup
also, i’m not held liable if you’re an idiot and screw something up
Side note: it was a sis190 or 191 chipset.